New Israeli legislation favoring Christians seeks to divide Palestinian community

On Monday, February 23, 2014, the Israeli Knesset enacted a new law that recognizes Muslim and Christian Arab communities as separate identities, giving them their own representation in an employment commission. The law passed by a margin of 31 to 6.

The new law passed by the Knesset favoring Christians is, to say the least, a deceitful political stunt by Likud-Beiteinu members aimed at sowing seeds of division among Christians and between Christians and Muslims.

For the last sixty-five years, the government of Israel has not shown favoritism or bias towards the Christian community of the land, so why now?

The Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek (Photo: Tree of Life)

During the Nakba of 1948, the Christians, like the Muslims, were dispossessed by the Zionists and were forced out of their homeland. Furthermore, during the military rule imposed by Israel on all Palestinians who stayed inside the Israeli state (1948-1966), Israel did not show favoritism to Christians over Muslims. Both were discriminated against and both were treated as unwanted aliens in their own land. There is a plethora of documentation to substantiate the history of that period. The problem for Israel in those days was not the Palestinians’ religious affiliation but their Palestinian national identity.

I believe that the new law reflects the moral bankruptcy of the government of Israel. Indeed, it must be in trouble to allow itself to stoop so low as to blatantly use this tactic to attempt to win the support of some Christians abroad, and, at the same time, sow dissent among Christians and Muslims. It is the old adage of “divide and rule.” This law is sinister in that it exploits the sensitive tensions among the religious communities of the Middle East, especially in light of what has been happening in Egypt and now is happening in Syria.

I am certain that the Palestinian community is mature enough not to fall into such a despicable religious trap.

There is another dishonest and hidden angle to this law. Jewish religious tradition has always considered Christianity, not Islam, as the mortal enemy of Jews and Judaism. This is due to the fact that the Christian faith came out of the same foundation as the Jewish faith, namely, the Hebrew Scriptures, i.e. the Christian Old Testament. I still remember the Israeli religious establishment discouraging Jewish students from visiting Christian churches while encouraging them to visit Muslim mosques. The advisory pointed out that there was greater affinity between Judaism and Islam, while the gap was quite wide between Judaism and Christianity.

What has caused this sudden infatuation with Palestinian Christians to merit new legislation? Or is it just an ugly political stunt? What favors can the right-wing Israeli government give the Palestinian Arab Christians who are Israeli citizens? Will it restore their confiscated land to them? Will it grant them equality with their fellow Jewish citizens? Or are we witnessing another divisive Israeli ploy similar to when Israel set the Druze community apart from its Arab base?

It is worth mentioning that over sixty years ago, Israel managed to make the Druze religion a separate ethnic entity, thus separating them from their Arab roots. Through this new legislation, Israel wants to make the Christian religion a separate ethnic identity in order to separate them from their Arab Palestinian roots. But in spite of what Israel has done to the Druze community, an increasing number of young Druze men have been resisting imposed Israeli military service.

Israel has been very shrewd in concocting devious ways and means to impose its will on the Palestinians and keep them weak and divided. It continues to connive ways to limit and even deprive them of their rights to the land so they will give up and leave.

I am certain that the Christian community in Israel will see through this new Israeli legislation, will expose its sinister nature, and reject it. It is my hope also that our people’s resilience and maturity will foil the Israeli government’s insidious objectives. This we can do through our unity and solidarity, as well as through our determination to continue to work for a just peace, inclusive democracy, and human dignity for all the people of our land.

About Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek

The Rev. Dr. Naim Ateek is a Palestinian priest in the Anglican Church and founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem.

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42 Responses

Always, in politics, the game of divide and conquer. It would be surprising to me to discover this strategy is not at play. Of course it is. It’s politics after all. How you get this across to American Jews and Christian fundies? Good luck at that!

/Jewish religious tradition has always considered Christianity, not Islam, as the mortal enemy of Jews and Judaism. This is due to the fact that the Christian faith came out of the same foundation as the Jewish faith, namely, the Hebrew Scriptures, i.e. the Christian Old Testament./

Really , not say from all those Jews that were murdered in the name of Jesus ?

Jesus did not instruct the murder of anyone! You use the name of Jesus in the most hateful disparaging way. Whenever Christians killed and oppressed others they were inspired by evil NOT the teachings of Jesus! Likewise, Zionist Christians are inspired by evil to support Zionism, not Jesus, because Jesus would never side with the oppression, ethnic cleansing, slaughter of Palestinians in Sabra/Shatila, Deir Yassin etc., the imprisonment of Palestinian children and the destruction of their homes and theft of their land. Jesus would never side with an Apartheid Regime! So all those Christians who support your criminal state are like those Christians who persecuted Jews. In supporting Zionism they have no faith and betray everything Jesus stood for!

Christian Zionist are a heretical sect of Christianity. Just look at Michelle Bachmann as a case in point. She is to Christianity as Zionism is to Judaism. Nicht wahr? Another analogy is that Nazism is to Christianity as Zionism is to Judaism. Eh?

@ OlegR
You should read up on your Talmud too? Anyway, you quote the Christian bible out of context, and there’s many ways to interpret what you quoted, given its parable context, e.g., here’s a few more interpretations that often differ a lot from most of those in the link you gave Kalithea: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090620222945AAaWDJ5

Personally, speaking of parables and story context, unlike Michelle Bachmann, for example, I don’t view reality through any set of religious goggles. That’s not to say perception does not give one a limited sense of reality, e.g., a poet does not look at a tree like the owner of a lumber business or his contracted lumberjacks do.

You mentioned: “But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.”

This is a quote taken out of context. It is a sentence from an allegory Jesus told, not something He told people to do.

What happens is that someone cherry picks a phrase he/she does not like and then it gets passed around by other people predisposed against Christianity to reinforce their biases without getting the real story.

Some of those were actually a bit dicey, kalithea. I’m thinking along the lines of “I came not to bring peace, but to bring a sword”, or ” I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what do I desire, if it is already kindled?” or “Think ye that I am come to give peace in the earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division” or “And brother shall deliver up brother to death, and the father his child: and children shall rise up against parents, and cause them to be put to death.” There’s lots more such as how he spoke to his mother or how he instructed his disciples to abandon their parents.

I guess it’s all in the interpretation and one can twist and turn those quotes to make them sound positive and charitable.

He was obviously not saying to go and do bad things. It means that the coming of the Messiah brings division because some people do not accept Him. If you go through the Old Testament Bible prophecies, you can see how the Messiah is associated with apocalyptic events.

The messages of Jesus and Paul were actually about equality and people living together regardless of their nationality. But as Paul explains in Romans 9-11 and unfortunately what we see today, not everyone accepts these ideas.

Islam is just a lukewarm re-hashing / re-working of both Judaism and Christianity by a group of people who felt that the best way to add legitimacy to their new religion was to base it on / derive it from two existing ones.

Gotta grant it to Mo’, though: Taking advantage of Jesus’ “after me comes the one more powerful than I” gaffe and proclaiming himself to be…
– that guy; and
– the “last of the prophets”,
…was pretty slick. :-)

eljay, all of them are opportunistic. Islam being a retread of Judaism and Christianity is not different. Most of what Jews picked up along the way by way of history, folklore, rites, customs and so on were from their stay in Babylon. I read somewhere that circumcision as a ritual predated Judaim by a couple of thousand years, but Judaism and Islam would have you believe it started with Abraham being tested and Adha. Jesus as a good Jew was circumcised within the prescribed period and said he hadn’t come to change a single iota to the religion but within a few years, Christianity’s marketing director decided to waive that painful requirement for new candidates along with a whole slew of other changes. That too was pretty slick and the number of new converts increased exponentially. Islam too promised a lot of goodies; they all do. Depends on l’air du temps and what’s in demand at the time.

Walid, I was specifically addressing the question “From where did Islam start?” But I completely agree that Judaism and Christianity are also just opportunistic, lukewarm re-hashings / re-workings of the religions, myths and customs that preceded them.

“I am certain that the Christian community in Israel will see through this new Israeli legislation,”

The Christians have always been divided among themselves as witnessed by the violent confrontations between Catholics, Orthodox, Armenians and so on over Jerusalem’s holy places and Israel has had a stranglehold on all of them, perhaps a bit less on the Anglicans and other Protestants.

As to Catholics and others under papal authority, there an arrangement between the Vatican and Israel whereby Israel leaves the Catholics “almost” alone to run their affairs in exchange for the Vatican not making waves about the occupation and other ugly sides of Israeli oppression. The Vatican has been spooked and kept off-balance for years with accusations of antisemitism thrown at it at every opportunity.

For the Greek Orthodox, there is an agreement between the PA, Israel, Jordan and the Church in Greece that the Greek Orthodox Patriarch has to be always chosen by these parties and of course, acceptable to Israel. Since the occupation, all the Patriarchs have been practically hand picked by Israel with the PA and Jordan going along for the ride. The Greek Orthodox Church with the last 2 Israeli picked Patriarchs have been heavily involved in corruption on a grand scale, most of it involving the sale and/or lease of church property to Israel in Jerusalem and elsewhere to be used for building settlements.

The Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem is practically the largest landowner beside the JNF. The Knesset, the PM residence, the Museum and most government buildings in Jerusalem are built on lands leased from the Greek Orthodox Church. All of these and several other commercial properties in Jerusalem are on leases set to expire in 2053 when Israel will have to vacate all these properties that will become properties of the Church. There has been ongoing talks with the new Patriarch to renew these leases but the Greek Orthodox community in Jerusalem is blocking the negotiations. Israel is claiming the last Patriarch (now under some kind of house arrest in Jerusalem) renewed these leases for another 99 years (beyond 2053) but they can’t come up with any such documents.

The new law may have more to do with these leases and with dissociating Christians from the PA and Jordan than with splitting the Palestinians. In any event, the Christians represent a small minority among Palestinians but having them on side with Israel would make Israel’s finishing off of the Muslims that much easier. Muslims and Christians will be losers with the new law.

W, Jones, the former Patriarch is Irenaeus (elected in 2001 to replace Patriarch Diodorus and deposed in 2005) and he is cloistered in a room above the Patriarchate in Jerusalem that some say is a form of imposed confinement while others say it’s self-imposed as if he leaves, he wouldn’t be allowed to come back (I have to watch my grammar from RoHa here). He was replaced by Patriarch Theophilos III, that’s also close to the Israelis and he too has a couple of tricks up his sleeve.

Yes, I can imagine what the official story is: he was making a land sale, so he was deposed and now they have a new patriarch. And I read some internet articles about it, but I wonder what is the real story behind what we see in the news. I am also aware that supposedly the new patriarch made some land agreements too.

I have just gotten to the part in the book where both the British and the Zionists in Palestine in the 1920s sought to defuse angry Palestinian opposition to Jewish nationalism by promoting Palestinian Muslim groups. The Brits and the Zionists felt that they could shatter Arab nationalism by dividing Muslims and Christians; they preferred a religious conflict.

[in the 1920’s] Betrayed by the British, the Palestinians railed against both the British mandate and Zionist settlement. In particular, the Palestinians opposed any British attempts to divide their community along religious grounds, demanding to be treated as a single community. The Palestinians felt that by trying to divide them on religious grounds, Britain was trying to undermine the united Palestinian position that opposed increased Zionist colonisation.

if i was israel i would be looking at its own growing sectarian divide between the Jewish religious extremist and the secular population

71% of Israeli society believe that the most acute conflict within Israel is that between the secular and ultra-Orthodox populations, as opposed to 41% who see the left-right tension as most acute, 33% who see the rich-poor conflict as the most serious, and 16% who regard the Ashkenazi-Sephardi conflict as the most dire;

if i was israel i would be looking at its own growing sectarian divide between the Jewish religious extremist and the secular population

That’s what they are doing. They have cut the subsidies that ultra-orthodox get. They have created forms of orthodox Judaism fully compatible with Zionism (Messianic Zionism) which eases cultural conversion. They are not moving to bring the ultra-orthodox into the draft.

Israelis are well aware they’ve cultivated and created this problem. For too long the non-ultra-othodox Israeli population was divided on the pro-peace / anti-peace axis with the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox able to swing back and forth to create a special situation. The right is finally able to absorb the center on the Palestinian issue and thus make progress on the religious divisions.

I think one of the goals of this tactic is to appease American Christians. Frankly, many are shocked by the criminal activities which the israeli government inflicts on Palestinians Christians. I think the Palestinian community would do well to seek to sew increasing discord between the zionists and their supporters in the US and the US’s Christian community, especially the Catholics.

“I believe that the new law reflects the moral bankruptcy of the government of Israel.”

You are so very correct, sir! It’s an ugly and nefarious tactic, but I have faith that the Palestinian people are far more intelligent, far more experienced, and infinitely more resilient to such desperate, pathetic, and transparent tactics than the Israelis take them for.

This might wash among some nutsy evangelicals, but not among ordinary people who have much more in common with each other than they have differences. ‘Palestinianism’ will trump these immoral attempts EVERY TIME! They all pray to the same God– or choose not to believe, or a little bit, etc.

They all yearn for their freedom, their rights, and their self-determination.

Israeli Jewish culture is pretty shallow. Most of the jews murdered by the nazis would find it alien. Very little continuity . Lots of militarism and paranoia. Virtually no Menschheit. The palestinians know who they are. Who are the Israelis now Zionism is breaking down?

THE NEW ISRAELI LEGISLATION FAVORING CHRISTIANS MIGHT ALSO HAVE SOMETHING TO DO WITH CHRISTIAN ZIONIST SETTLERS.
SEE: “Worldwide Biblical Zionists”, By Rachel Tabachnick, talk2action.org, 10/19/09

[EXCERPTS] Worldwide Biblical Zionists (WBZ) is a project of World Likud and its evangelical arm, World Evangelical Zionists. It was developed to aid Christian Zionists who wish to make aliyah (move to Israel) with the stated goal of providing assistance for housing, employment, legal services, and pre-military training. . .
. . . Christian Zionist financial support for the West Bank has been ongoing for years, and Ariel has been a favorite for donors and adopt-a-settlement programs marketed to churches. However, some Likud party members and Christian Zionists are now taking even more extraordinary measures to populate the West Bank, showing just how far the concept of Christian Zionism can be taken.
In January, 2007, Christian Zionist Joel Bell became director of the World Evangelical Zionists (WEZ), the evangelical department of World Likud. Bell states that in June of 2007 the “Jewish Zionist Congress and other Zionist organizations began supporting WEZ’s affiliation. This launched Biblical Zionists activities together with Governmental Institutions.”
A joint Board of Governors Conference with WEZ and World Likud leaders was held in Texas in July 2007, and a new organization was launched in November under the under the name Worldwide Biblical Zionists. Danon and Bell were joined as keynote speakers at the Texas conference by Sagiv Assulin of Likud, and Christian Zionists William Koenig, former White House correspondent in the George W. Bush administration. Morton Klein of ZOA was also listed as a speaker in the promotional materials including this flash presentation. Other guest speakers listed in the promotional material were Keith and Jodie Anderson. Jodie Anderson heads the Battalion of Deborah, an organization which works with the Knesset’s Christian Allies Caucus and has, according to Public Research Associates’ RightWeb, received funds from Irving Moskowitz. . .

The way the bots treat Druze soldiers is pretty instructive.
they expect them to die for the Jewish state but their villages get less funding than Jewish villages and whenever something goes wrong the IDF won’t stand behind them . Zionism is sick.

JERUSALEM (JTA) — For Americans, the definition of national identity is straightforward: It goes hand in hand with citizenship. If you are an American citizen, you are also American by nationality. The same applies to the French, Germans and many others.

In Israel, however, there is a different but equally valid conception of the relationship between citizenship and nationality. Indeed, this understanding is central to Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.
The State of Israel maintains a national population registry in which every resident is classified by both “citizenship” and “nationality.” The citizenship of all Israelis is listed as “Israeli.” However, under “nationality,” Israelis are defined as belonging to different ethnic and religious groups, among them Jewish, Arab and Druze
In a decision handed down in October 2013, the Supreme Court denied the request to recognize Israeli as a nationality. It gave several essential reasons for supporting a specific Jewish nationality over a general Israeli nationality.

First, since it is reasonable to assume that a person cannot have two nationalities, this change would compel Jewish citizens of Israel to choose between being Israeli and Jewish. Most Israeli Jews would be forced into an impossible predicament. We see ourselves as both Jewish and Israeli, and one does not exclude the other.
………….

I keep searching for some more sophisticated description of these crazies than just crazy. The best I have been able to find is still related to ‘cult thinking’… where the cult applies a kind of ”pseudo-logic” to their cult myths to ‘redefine the outer universe ‘ as it applies to them specifically…as in this redefining of the universally understood and accepted meaning of nationality. This constant making up of and twisting of universal concepts and definitions is I think their attempt to skirt the ‘alien’ label by the rest of the world, but still be an exception to the rest of the world.
They need to move this to another planet.

How could they assert their supremacy without separating citizenship and nationality? Just as Israelis are trying to divide Christians and Muslims and even Christians as a whole to create animosity, I’m hoping one day many more Jews will distance themselves from Zionists, so much so, that anti-Zionist Jews will insist that Jews who ARE Zionist and Jews in Israel stop calling themselves “Jewish” and remove Jewish from their national description and replace it with Zionist, as in Israeli…Zionist, as it should already be.

American, whether a religion or a nation is a never ending debate. Take the case in France . The question was debated as far back as 225 years ago right after the Revolution when in an attempt to emancipate the French Jews, a prominent legislator stated on Dec. 23, 1789 in the National Assembly that ” everything must be refused to them as a nation but that everything must be made available to them as individuals; they must be citizens”. His opponent in the legislature, Father Maury, argued against this proposal saying the word “Jew” is not the name of a sect, but that of a nation that has its laws that it always followed and that it wants to continue following and for Jews to become citizens, they have to be naturalized and went on to discount it by disparaging Jews with the usual accusations. The following month, the Jews of France’s Midi region were naturalized and on Sept 27th of following year, so were the rest of France’s Jews. So use of either term depends on who is using it. I think it’s a religion but Jews themselves are insisting they are a nation.

. I think it’s a religion but Jews themselves are insisting they are a nation.

The confusion comes from these facts, imo:

Judaism is a religion of nationality (peoplehood); if you believe in the Jewish religion (most variants) you perforce believe in a Jewish nation/people.

Conversely, Jewish nationalism –even if stripped of any belief in God–is based on religious ideas: the Chosen People, The Land of Israel, Exile, Wandering, Return etc. –all mythological ideas which would be essentially meaningless without their Biblical foundation.

So, Jewish religion and Jewish nationalism can never be completely separated.

That does not, however, mean that Jewish nationalism must take a modern political form of ethnocratic territorial sovereignty.

Sibiriak, how much of this nation-affinity is natural or rather spontaneous and how much of it is programmed to be indivisible from the religion? The incessant reminders on the “never-again” is part of the nation creation. Where’s Shlomo when you need him?

Even if they re a nation Walid they need to tell us what their borders are and cut the sh#t with invading Lebanon every 7 years.
If they want to have a Jewish state they have to leave the nihilism behind and start thinking sustainability. They need a constitution, they need protections for minority rights, they need a decent education system, they need decent social security. It’s not fair to expect us to support Meir Panim this Purim.

A country without borders. Maybe they feel that God didn’t just promise them Palestine but the whole world. Don’t they claim that Israel is the navel of the world?

“… As the navel is set in the centre of the human body,
so is the land of Israel the navel of the world…
situated in the centre of the world,
and Jerusalem in the centre of the land of Israel,
and the sanctuary in the centre of Jerusalem,
and the holy place in the centre of the sanctuary,
and the ark in the centre of the holy place,
and the Foundation Stone before the holy place,
because from it the world was founded.”

No wonder the Zionists desperately want the Haram al-Sharif where el-sakhara is now located. This is why the Muslims faced Jerusalem for their 3 daily prayers during Islam’s first years.

I am very familiar with the 1700’s ‘Jew qua Jew’ vr ‘Jew qua nation’ debates on Jewish citizenship in the nations–I have read the actual documents on the offers/case put forth by the nations on Jewish citizenship and the Jewish responses of the period.

As to the “debate over it” –that is and was a debate only brought about by the Jews who wished to have citizenship benefits of the nations but still retain their own religious laws for the ‘tribal nation” that would supersede the national laws.
The rest of the universe does not accept the Jewish definition of nationality as one that can be an “ethnic” or a religion.
Because nations even back then did not accept, or to put it more accurately would not accept “Jews as a nation”, or even more accurately
did not want Jews acting as a tribal nation of their own within the nation they were being offered citizenship in was the reason it was subjected to ‘debate’ in the first place.
I don’t have the link to the book with the documents handy but I’ve posted it on MW long ago so you can look for it if interested. If you read the back and forth you can see how the Jews were grilled on national
loyalty vr the tribe…asking them questions about what they would put first in certain instances or issues in the nation if there were conflicts in their beliefs and the nations interest or business. You could say the nations ‘recognized’ the Jews acting a people nation–but rejected the concept of Jews acting and seeing themselves that way as incompatible with nations definitions of nationality for its citizens.

The Jewish claim to be a “people nation’ and act as a nation was always
the problem for the nations and the Jews….long before Zionism and Israel. The ‘religious people nation’ was promoted most heavily by the Rabbis of Judaism–they were the ones that resisted the nations requirements for Jewish citizenship and argued for ‘exceptions’ for Jews to some of the ‘common’ national laws that applied to other citizens. Just as today the Jewish leadership is afraid of the tribe ‘assimilating’, they wanted to hold together the tribe as not just a religion but as a separate people even within a nation.

All of this peoplehood and world wide nation of a religo/ethnic ‘nationality’ now on steroids by Zionism and Israel….but not new. The ‘ethnic nationality’ is one the enlightened nations were leery of and one that modern nations don’t buy but Zionist still keep promoting as what Jews are.

“Because nations even back then did not accept, or to put it more accurately would not accept “Jews as a nation”,

American, this was because this went against the grain of emancipation that was the order of the day. It’s a Rabbi thing as you said and makes me think that they wanted to stay by themselves in the ghettos as much as the others preferred having them live there. They looked different, dressed different, prayed different and then asked why they were singled out. It’s a chicken or egg thing that makes you wonder which came first. Conversely, the Druze an offshoot of Ismaeli Shia also afraid of being wiped out over time protected themselves, their community and their faith by not taking in new converts and by practicing “taqiyya” a religious dissimulation that let them blend-in within their environment while secretly following the precepts of their own faith. This carried the Druze for over a thousand years in relative safety. I think the Jews wanted it to be known that they were different, chosen and so on.

“It’s a chicken or egg thing that makes you wonder which came first. ”
”I think the Jews wanted it to be known that they were different, chosen and so on.”…Walid

I think the chicken and egg thing sums up most of the historical Jews vr Others feud. …’You did this, …no we didn’t, you hated first, did so and so to us first,”… back and forth, on and on.
As for Jew wanting it to be know they were different, it looks more like they wanted to be ‘ officially acknowledged’ as different by exceptions to the laws and conditions put on the rest of nations populations. Hence the ‘difference resentment.
A have your cake and eat it too…..part of but not part of… an exception.
No better example than among US zionist wing of Jews today – democracy and equality for Jews in the USA and world–but not for non Jews in the Jewish State.
Exceptionally blind to the problems with exceptionalism.

”Therefore, American Jews cannot be American by nationality, by definition’..

Yea that’s the logical conclusion that comes out of their illogical delusion.
Its just one step further than the Isr-Zio campaign on American Jews to encourage their embrace of ‘2’ nationalities—being also a citizen of Israel regardless of where they are.
Personally I think the majority of US Jews—even some still deluded by the US & Isr one and the same propaganda— would have a frigging heart attack if told their US nationality and what goes along with it was no more and their nationality is now officially just Jewish.

The truth is that Zionists can’t stand Christians for many reasons, but expect them to get much more aggressive in their campaign to woo Christians over to their camp now that BDS is gaining traction. It’s all part of the anti-BDS strategy. Christian Zionists make up a small portion of the 2.2 billion Christian community. Zionists have their work cut out for them. No true Christian should embrace Zionism after what its done to the Palestinian people.

During its last decade, South African Apartheid also tried to resuscitate itself by establishing a Tricameral Parliament, where the Coloured and Indian population groups were granted very limited political voice. The Coloured and Indian population groups were of course less numerous, and to the ruling whites, less black.

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